Understanding whether, and in what situations, time spent in prison is criminogenic or preventive has proven …'s criminal justice system, offering new insights into how incarceration affects subsequent crime and employment. We construct a … assignment of criminal cases to judges who differ systematically in their stringency in sentencing defendants to prison. Using …

In this paper we test for the theory of deterrence. We exploit the natural experiment provided by the Collective … punishment to former inmates recommitting a crime can be considered as good as randomly assigned. Based on a unique data set on … recommit a crime by 1.24 percent: this corroborates the general deterrence hypothesis. However, this effect depends on the time …

Incarceration is a crucial part of the scholarly analysis of crime, but what happens inside penal institutions largely … NPS. The analysis exploits cross-prison variation in the initial size of the drug market and shows high-intensity NPS …

I study the causal pathways that link prison work programs to convict rehabilitation, leveraging administrative data … and the isolation of mechanisms. Due to competing channels, I find that work in unskilled prison jobs impacts convicts on … the reincarceration rate, within three years of release, of convicts on terms longer than six months – because prison work …

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected … endogeneity concerns, we exploit the random assignment of judges who differ in their propensity to send defendants to prison …

money for an additional minute. The distribution of the disutility of prison is not degenerate, generating heterogeneity in …

research, the results from this study support the hypothesis of a crime-prison effect that diminishes with the scale of … local crime rates. We assess the effects of a recent reform in California that caused a sharp and permanent reduction in the …-specific prison incarceration rates.We find very little evidence of an effect of the large reduction in incarceration rates on violent …

approximate 20 percent decline in total property crime arrests, and shifts in the composition of arrests away from felonies …

data from male rural-urban migrants prison inmates and comparable non-inmates to examine whether parental absence in …

Crime rates in the United States have declined to historical lows since the early 1990s. Prison and jail incarceration … assessment of whether the crime declines can be attributed to the massive expansion of the U.S. criminal justice system. We argue … that the crime is certainly lower as results of this expansion and the crime rate in the early 1990s was likely a third …